


Unafraid

by Pannathian



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Deaf!Mabel, Disabled!Twins, F/M, ProstheticLeg!Dipper, Suicide mention, Violence, but also im not because i love this, im so sorry, lmao im heartless, murder mention
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-08
Updated: 2015-03-14
Packaged: 2018-03-11 04:11:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3313451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pannathian/pseuds/Pannathian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No good deed goes unpunished, she supposed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part One

**Author's Note:**

> So this is kinda just... A thing... Pardon any POV changes and crap, I write in a rush since I don't have much time lmaooaoao but yeah, aside from any spelling errors and such, I hope you enjoy! (btw if any names aren't capitalized, it's because on my tumblr, where these were originally uploaded, my theme makes EVERYTHING capitalized, so the most I can do is sentence structure it instead of going through every single line which honestly i am too lazy to do im sorry hbhjjugyfdfghjj)

He was out cold- Mabel was no doctor, but Dipper’s chilled cheeks and shallow breath was obvious enough that he wasn’t going to be waking up anytime soon. She tried not to look down at the mess where his leg had once been, but she couldn’t help herself. The hot tears dripping onto his cheeks from hers lightly washed some of the grime caked on his skin away.

"I always knew it would be you, shooting star." She didn’t flinch, she was no longer afraid, and as she rose, grappling hook clanking on her hip, and axe gripped in both hands, she felt only rage. Hot, white fury dug into her hands- or maybe she was splintering the wood.

"Oh?" She replied evenly, turning and looking up to the floating object-head. Tears ran down her face, purely out of anger. This thing, this demon, this monster, had hurt her family. Stan, Dipper, Wendy, Soos, Robbie, everyone. Leveled the town, and nearly killed her and everyone in the process.

"My my, how cute you look so angry! I never though of you as a angry crier. I bet you’d still cry beaten into a pulp though." He grinned, eye narrowing as his hands burst into bright blue flames. Before he could even approach her she held out a hand, frowning.

"Wait." She said, voice so stern for such a small, soft thing.

"What, i don’t have all day?" Bill growled anxiously.

"Let’s level the playing field. I’ll make a deal with you. I’ll fight you- an actual fight, but i decide how." Bill seemed the roll around the idea in his mouth, like sour candy. Mabel knew he wouldn’t be able to resist the idea of a deal, and she also knew she had little to no chance at winning against him in a battle of force.

"Fine, what are the regulations?" He agreed, but mabel cracked a smile, and held out her hand.

"Shake first. You like doing that right?" She said coldly, holding out her small, bruised hand to him. He floated down and bent to grip it.

"You’re awfully upset aren’t you?"

"Shake. It." Bill frowned at her, and shook, a bright blue flame engulfing their hands. Before he could pull away, mabel’s grip tightened and she raised her axe with her other hand and brought it down swiftly onto the demon’s physical form. A deafening screech blasted her ears and only a few moments later she was on her back, ears ringing and vision blackening. She could glimpse bill flailing, trying to pull out the axe embedded in his chest. She forced her battered body up, feeling her lung shudder and scream at her to lay down. She stood anyways, coughing and tasting rust.

"The r-regulations… you vile thing… is that we fight on even grounds. You give up your ethereal status and become human- then we’ll see who’s a freakin’ meatsack." She spat, and Bill spun, his normal triangle replaced with a void- her mind went blank as she stared into it, and only his angry, vicious screaming broke through her deaf ears. As her eyes fluttered shut and she began to wobble, Bill’s form began to warp, fire and darkness spitting from him like a live wire. She collapsed, the image on his bright flames burned in the back of her eyes.

Mabel’s eyes cracked open. She didn’t have that moment of waking up where her eyes were still shut, but she was awake and alert. Instead she just opened her eyes and she was awake. Dipper leaned over her, head bandaged and arm in a sling. His eyes widened and he sputtered, beginning to say things, but mabel couldn’t hear him. It was then she realized she couldn’t hear anything. Dipper cupped her face, sobbing and saying things, quickly and stuttering, she knew. He always stuttered when he was crying. Suddenly, he was gently pulled away, and grunkle stan loomed over both of them. He whispered something to dipper and the boy’s face fell. They both looked to mabel and she offered them a half-smile, the best she could do as pain in her face, chest, and just about everywhere else began to register.

Dipper fell to the ground, crying she was sure, because he had interlocked his hand with hers, and she could feel him shaking. Mabel looked the stan, who was in a hospital gown- had dipper been wearing one too?- And his eyes were red and puffy. He’d been crying too. Mabel wasn’t sure why, but she didn’t feel sad. In pain, yes, but not sad.

The sound of bill’s last screams were what did it. They blasted her eardrums and her auditory system just gave up. Mabel sat, weeks after the destruction of gravity falls, in a chair in front of a few very kind nurses. Her hand ached, but she had insisted upon writing out what she wanted to say instead of learning sign language. She didn’t have time, nor patience, really, to learn an entirely new language. Written english was just fine with her. 

They asked her how she felt, if her fast recovery made her weary, if she was in pain, to rate it from one to eleven, about this and that. But her focus was on the boy on the opposite side of the room, who was limping on a prosthetic leg to stan’s arms. Her brother. When she began to cry, the nurses frantically asked her if she was in pain.

No, she wasn’t. But he was.

She was home now- actual home. Her mother and father cried for hours at the airport, holding their children and sobbing. They hadn’t been able to fly up to the hospital in portland because the hospital bills had drained them enough. Stan was lucky enough to scrounge up donations for them all to fly home and leave the barren wasteland of gravity falls behind.

When she got back into her room, she realized she hadn’t been in her own room since may. The calendar decorated in sparkly stickers and glitter said november 21st. 

It wasn’t until hours later, that dipper came in to ask her to turn off her stereo did she even realize it had been on. She checked the titled as she turned it off. ‘Cray cray’ from sev’ral timez. Her parents had been playing her old, favorite song on repeat.

When she walked into homeroom on the first day of the spring semester, she cracked a lopsided smile at the kids who leaned over to whisper to their friends. She ignored how her teacher introduced her in sign language, even though she didn’t know it. When he turned to her and signed at her, she patiently kneeled, pulling off her backpack and rummaging through it for her notebook and pencil. She stood again and scribbled on the page.

'I don't use sign language. Writing is fine. You'll need to print me out notes if you haven't already.'

He went red in the face and nodded, explaining to the rest of the class. 

Many later that day tested to see if she really was deaf, and dipper screamed at them to ‘fuck off’. They came up from behind and yelled in her ear, called at her from across the room, and some tossed pencils at the back of her head. She was deaf not brain dead.

She recognized him the second she saw him. She froze, glued to the sidewalk and shining in her sparkling purple sweater. Dipper, who held onto her arm for support on long walks, looked at her curiously. Her eyes were fixed on the man through the barely tinted glass into a cafe. A plume of blond hair curled around his head, long lashes blinking lazily behind a pair of thick glasses. He was reading a paper, sipping on coffee as dark as his skin, and for a moment, mabel stopped breathing.

She hadn’t been afraid then, so why was she now?

He looked up, and she knew he felt her gaze. Unable to find the source, his eyes dropped back to his paper. The headline on the back read ‘repairs in oregon still underway’.

She wouldn’t be afraid. She’d faced death before. It didn’t look like much.


	2. Part Two

'Mabel, what's the matter?' Dipper had written. They were breaking from dipper's stretches, and mabel had sat to finish crocheting. She stared at the notebook thrust into her face and frowned. She looked to her brother, confused, who in return sighed frustratedly and took back to notebook, furiously scribbling again.

'You've got something on your mind- what is it?'

She stared at the messy writing, a tight pout making her lips burn slightly. She couldn’t tell him. She hadn’t told anyone. The battle, the deal, everything after dipper had been knocked out was unknown. What made it worse was they dipper, stan, and everyone else all knew that mabel was keeping it from them. She had simply assured them that there was no need to worry about bill anymore. Or so she had thought. She pushed dipper’s notebook away, frowning at him again. She shook her head and looked back down to the hat in her lap. She didn’t need to hear to know he huffed angrily before turning and storming off.

The next time she saw bill wasn’t for another year, when dipper and her had finally reached high school. They were walking to class after their free period was over, and she saw him strolling on the other side of the street. She didn’t expect him to also be looking around while she was, and the moment of normal, awkward eye contact almost made her question it was him.

Then he smiled, and she wasn’t unsure anymore. She whipped her eyes away, grabbing dipper, and quietly thanking that he was now fully adapted to his metal leg and pulled him along, rushing away.

But she could feel his eyes on her back, burning into her back, and she could see the burnt images on his fire behind her eyes, and she could feel his breath on her neck, even if he was yards away.

She could feel him.

Stan had become a very good cook in the last year and a half in the official pines household. Mabel loved when he made sunny-side up eggs, but today she began to cry when she saw the round, yellow yolk in front of her. The nightmare she’d had last night hadn’t been so frightening until now, when her breakfast seemed to remind her entirely of him and it drove her mad. She only offered a quick request for cereal before fleeing up to her room and refusing to goto school.

She knew it was selfish, that someone should watch and walk dipper to school, but she didn’t want to chance seeing him again. 

When she finally changed out of her pyjama’s around noon when no one was home, she covered her full length mirror because she could have sworn she saw an eye in the reflection of her dark closet.

Finally, one day while she was in geometry, the door opened and an office aide came in with a office pass. She watched her teacher take the slip and squint, looking up to her, glad to see she was already watching. He waved the slip at her and she got up and retrieved it, shooing away a student that offered to help her to the office. She knew they meant well, but all she wanted to do was slap them. She wasn’t incapable of walking herself places.

When she arrived at the office, she froze in the doorway. Her eyes glued to the man with his hands folded neatly behind his back and yellow sweater. The office lady held up a sign that read-

'Your uncle is here for lunch!' And a big swirly mark probably meant to be decorative, but it just looked like the 'h' had been stretched past it's rational boundaries. Bill smiled at her shocked expression, and she closed her gaping mouth. She stiffened, straightening her back and returning his relaxed grin.

She wasn’t going to be afraid, no matter how frighteningly his eyes shone.


	3. Part Three

Mabel goes with him. She makes no emotion when they walk out the front doors of the school, and follows him quietly, eyes locked on her shoes. She finds it ironic, as she’s looking down, that she’s wearing a skirt much like the one she’d worn when she fought bill before. 

Bill stops and she stops with him. He doesn’t turn, just folds his arms, and lets her take in where they are, since she hadn’t been watching really. It was the cafe where she had first seen him, and he opened the door, letting her inside, and she watched him closely as they entered the busy cafe.

She doesn’t interact until he does.

They have lunch, and surprisingly the cafe is quite nice. They’re served by a very bouncy girl, whose bright eyes and thick brows furrowed in obnoxious sympathy when mabel explained her deafness on paper.

Regardless of her waitress treating her like an infant, the meal was pleasant. Bill leaned back casually in his chair, arm slung over the back and head turned to look out at the large window in the front. He chews his parsley and avocado sandwich thoughtfully, and mabel wondered if he still wasn’t used to having actual tastebuds.

Eventually, they finish, and he’s paid- with what money, mabel wondered- and they’re sitting, staring. Bill shows no emotion, just blank boredom, and mabel tries to resist the furrowed brow she could feel coming on.

His mouth opens after what feels like an eternity, and mabel loses it. The table flips, the glasses shattering on the ground and water spilling on herself and bill, and she’s screaming at him, crying, and he keeps his soft, barely amused grin. Of course, her screaming isn’t comprehendible. It’s english, but it’s slurry, and hoarse. She’s sobbing and picking up her chair and about to hit him with it, before she’s restrained by a man she later finds was an off-duty cop.

She cries for hours, she cries until her eyes burn worse than when she saw his fire. She cries and pushes dipper out of her room and locks her door and breaks just about everything in her room. She cries until she passes out, and when she wakes up at 2:56 a.M. She cries again, leaving her room and crawling into bed with dipper, apologizing, but really only mumbling and humming, but he understands.

She stays home from school for a week, and when she goes back, everyone knows. It was in the paper and on the news. They were scared of her now, and kept their distance. No more pens at her head, or people trying to shout at her. Dipper appreciates that he doesn’t have to tell anyone off, but he doesn’t appreciate the looks he and mabel get.

At lunch, a boy approaches her, and says something to her, and though she con’t hear him, she knows it’s something awful by the way his mouth is twitching upwards in a smirk. She also knows by the way dipper stands up, and yells something at him, causing the whole lunch room to turn their attention to them. The boy mumbles something, and dipper attacks him.

They’re both suspended the next day, and the headline that sunday reads “student beaten by lame boy”. She knows that the headline didn’t mean a bum leg.

She knew the second her eyes flashed open that he was in there. Her window was open, and the dim lamp on the other side of the room is on. He sits underneath it, and watches her as she sits up and rubs her eyes, patiently waiting as she slowly slips out of bed and puts on her slippers, padding over to him and sitting cross-legged in front of him.

They stare at each other, and mabel begins to feel the rage again, but bill does something to stop her.

She stares at the knife in his hand that he’s offering to her, and the gleam reflecting on the sharpened surface dilutes whatever reflection of herself she would have seen.

She doesn’t know what to do, but he takes her hand that’s resting on her knee, and puts the knife in it. He still has no emotion, and his mouth opens again.

It closes and she gets it.

He’s suffering. He hates being human. He hates breathing, and walking, and thinking about death. He feels mortal and it’s excruciating.

But he’s a coward. He’s asking her to kill him instead of doing it himself. It’s funny almost- that now pain to him is intolerable when for so long he tormented her brother and her. Mabel smiles, coldly, and the whole thing seems familiar, though this time she’s sitting on her pink carpet at 1 a.M. In the warm late summer heat and not wobbling on bloodied and bruised knees in the middle of burnt debris and chaos.

She drops the knife, and stands, smiling. She begins to laugh. She laughs and laughs until her stomach hurts so bad that she vomits in her trashcan. She laughs and cries, and crawls back into bed and sobs.

She doesn’t know when she fell asleep, but when she woke up, bill was still there, staring at the floor, half-awake. She ignores him, dragging herself to her closet and pulling out clothes for the day. She undresses and dresses in front of him, and he never looks up. She leaves him in there and meets dipper in the hallway, who was about to come in. They goto breakfast and when mabel comes back up, bill is asleep, sitting at her writing desk.

She picks up the knife from last night, and stuffs it under clothes in her closet before grabbing her work from the desk (thankfully, bill had been kind enough to not sleep on her homework), and sit on her bed.

He doesn’t wake up for hours.


	4. Part Four

When Bill does wake up, Mabel is still working, drawing out long, trig equations and exhausted looking. She doesn't notice when he peels his face from the polished surface of her desk and stare at her. He very slowly and quietly pushes himself up and the chair back, walking to the side of the bed. Mabel's eyes flicker to the side and she jumps and whips her head up. The moment of surprise disappears and she frowns at him. They share another stare of silence, and Mabel ignores how his eye twitches at her.

She looks down and writes out a small sentence, holding it up to him.

'you can't stay here' And his face bends into fury, and before she can even stop him, he grabs the work on her lap and throws it aside, jumping onto her and pinning her on the bed. She struggles, refusing to make any sound of fear or discomfort, slamming her palm into Bill's cheek and making a defensive movement to try and stop the fist about to come into her eye.

Pain ricochets through her arm and up into her shoulder, and she knows the hit has left a nasty bruise. Her arm falls limp, and Bill rears again to throw another punch, his face contorted into unholy rage. She closes her eyes, turning away and bracing herself for impact, but it never comes, and she feels the mattress compress next to her head.

When she cracks her eyes open, Bill's head is hung and he's shaking. She wants to smile- wants to take pride in his suffering and knowing that he is too much of a coward to end it himself.

But she can't. She just stares at his hair, emotionless. She feels cold, and angry, and unsatisfied. Even though this is what she wanted, for him to feel pain like she did and Dipper did, no pride came from seeing him cry.

He raises his head and his dark skin is flush dark red with anger and pent-up emotions. She lets him breathe; lets him take a moment to exhale whatever anger he needed to let out. After that, she slowly sits up, placing a hand on his chest and pushing him back to give her space. He doesn't protest, and actually scoots away, sitting back on his knees and staring at her. 

She gets up and picks up everything he threw down, ordering the papers and placing them all on her desk, but taking a notebook and pencil with her to sit down in front of him. She hands it to him and waits, watching him carefully.

He writes, slowly and messily, as though writing was difficult. When he hands it back to her, he does so violently, and she can see the anger spill over the glass.

'you can't leave me like this'

Mabel laughs, and Bill looks worried, like she was going to cry and vomit again, but she just shakes her head and write furiously.

'yes, i can. dont ask for something like that unless you can give me my hearing back, or Dipper's leg, or Stan's home, or Gravity Falls. dont ask for anything especially not from me'

Bill stares at the paper and shakes more than he was before.

'this is agony, human emotions are awful and infinitely more excruciating than I am willing to put up with'

Mabel sighs and rolls her eyes.

'yeah, sucks to be a meatsack, huh? you still cant stay here. go live your pathetic existence somewhere else a hundred miles away from me and my family'

Bill looks hurt, and doesn't write back, he just tosses the notebook onto the ground and turns away, flopping back onto the bed and rolling away from her.

It's childish, and Mabel is unsure how to interpret it. She can't tell if he's lying, if he's in control of himself and trying to make her let her guard down. But it doesn't seem to be so impossible that Bill suddenly can't understand or control emotions, especially since before he has such a limited range of them. She breathes heavily, and rubs her eyes, looking to the clock on her desk that reads 10:14 p.m.

She decides she should sleep, and that tomorrow she'll talk to Dipper and stay in his room all day so she doesn't have to deal with Bill.

When she wakes up, Bill is next to her, laying on top of the covers and snoring softly, and she contemplates how he would react to her shoving him from her bed.


	5. Chapter 5

Mabel stared at the back of Bill’s head, frowning and chewing thoughtfully on the idea to shove the hellish creature from her space, but instead sat up. She went to shake him awake, but a moment of rage overtook her and her hand shook, making her draw back and whip him violently with her hand. He yelped awake, flailing a bit, and Mabel still slightly shook, but the release of energy was enough to keep her from strangling him.

  
He turned on her, snarling at her, snapping his teeth like some wild dog, before slowing and eventually rubbing his head with a reddened face. He wasn’t toally grasping this ‘deaf’ thing. He stared at her and mouthed ‘Why’, and she cocked an unamused brow at him.

  
She didn’t hear the door swing open, but all she needed to see was Bill’s startled face turning red with embarrassment to turn in horror and meet eyes with Dipper, whose baggy eyes were now stretched into equal measures of horror. He looked between Bill and Mabel before reaching down to pull off his prosthetic and throw it at Bill, Mabel immediately jumping off her bed and grabbing Dipper, who was yelling at Bill. She clasped her hands over his mouth, trying to do something she hadn’t in a while- speak.

  
That shut Dipper up quick enough and let his prosthetic slide back into place. He glared at Bill with murder in his eyes, and the demon just stared back wide-eyed and confused. She pointed at Bill, giving him a ‘stay there or else’ look, and dragging Dipper back to his room, shutting her door behind her.

  
—

  
Dipper didn’t understand- of course not. She hadn’t expected him to. Immediately upon understanding the situation, Dipper insisted they kill him, or at least get him out of their lives permanently. Mabel refused, on accounts she wasn’t sure were really her reasons.

 

‘Mabel, he will KILL you- he was in your bed!’

  
‘I know he was, he’s… Been in my room for a while.’

  
“HE’S BEEN WHAT!” Dipper screamed, and Mabel slammed her hand over his mouth again. She glared before writing again.

  
‘God, dipper, calm down. If I thought I couldnt have handled it I would have told you.’

  
‘I know, that’s why you made this stupid deal in the first place… without asking me…’

  
Mabel couldn’t write much back. What could she even say. She hadn’t meant for that to happen, for any of this to happen. She just wanted to protect her family, and what else could she have done.  
‘You weren’t the only one who suffered dipper, don’t make this about you.’ She felt maybe that had been to cold, but Dipper looked just irritated.

  
‘I know it isn’t, but mabel this isn’t your job, you didn’t have to do that, and you dont have to do this.’

  
She bit it back.

  
‘Then whose is it, dipper? I didn’t see any of you ready to stand up and take him on. Now he’s useless and weak, and confused. He doesn’t understand himself, and now feelings have made him even weaker- it’s pathetic. Besides, he hasn’t made any move to hurt me- he was just trying to seem mache still in the beginning, but now he hurts and… and I want him to.’

  
Dipper stared at his sister, whose head was lowered and to the side. He wanted to cry and hold her and never let go. Wanted to give her back her childhood, do what she had always asked- not obsess over that stupid book.

  
He grabbed her, pulling her flush to him and hiding himself, his shame, his guilt in her hair, saying nothing, not even able to shed the tears that burned in his throat. She wrapped her arms around him too, and began to cry, hiccupping. They laid down, holding one another and crying softly, Dipper whispering unheard apologies and words of promise of a better sibling. Mabel tried to speak back, but she knew it only came out as whines and half-slurred ‘sorry’s’ and ‘i love you all’.

  
Dipper fell back asleep first, exhausted from exerting more energy than usual, and Mabel traced his birthmark with her hand, hot, quiet tears sliding down her face, tickling her nose.  
She had to make Bill understand the pain they were going through. Had to take back what was hers, what was her loved ones. Had to take back Dipper’s independence.  
Had to take back her life.


End file.
